With what joy I begin to read a poem, which I confide in as an inspiration! And now my chains are to be broken; I shall mount abov...e these clouds and opaque airs in which I live,--opaque, though they seem transparent,--and from the heaven of truth I shall see and comprehend my relations. That will reconcile me to life, and renovate nature, to see trifles animated by tendency, and to know what I am doing. Life will no more be a noise; now I shall see men and women, and know the signs by which they may be discerned from fools and satans. This day shall be better than my birth-days: then I became an animal: now I am invited into the science of the real.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full- blown liberty, there is nothing like it in... its uncontrollable strength, just because it is the very essence of mind, and that as its very actuality. Whole continents, Africa and the East, have never had this Idea, and are without it still. The Greeks and Romans, Plato and Aristotle, even the Stoics, did not have it. On the contrary, they saw that it is only by birth or by strength of character, education, or philosophy that the human being is actually free. It was through Christianity that this Idea came into the world. According to Christianity, the individual as such has an infinite value as the object and aim of divine love, destined as mind to live in absolute relationship with God himself, and have God's mind dwelling in him: i.e. man is implicitly destined to supreme freedom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Freedom to think our own thoughts, freedom to utter them, freedom to live out the promptings of our inner life ultimated in this c...onvention, was termed a monstrosity of the 19th century. What was it?--the legitimate out-birth of the eternal law of progress. This reformation underlies every other; it is the only healthful centre around which hope of humanity can revolve.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to t...he proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sence, we can not dedicate--we can not consecrate--we can not hallow--this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing ca...use with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Between the Christian and Roman ideals of the early centuries A.D. there is a disjunction which is perfect. Rome stands for corpor...ate civic strength, Christianity (at least in its early stages when the Second Advent was a daily possibility) abominates all that is secular; Rome stands for a disciplined society in which tolerance allows all sorts to live together in peace, Christianity is a narrowly exclusive sect which shrinks apart. When Rome was doing all she could to hold together society and civilization, Christianity was becoming chief of the forces of disintegration. In the end Christianity triumphed but who shall say that the enemy was Rome? No doubt it shed (as unfeelingly as any fledgling) the shell which had fostered it; but the shell had been cracked from outside. Now it is a momentous happening that the beginnings of the Christian and the Roman imperial eras nearly coincide in time. The two were enemies from birth. The Roman Empire is dead, the Christian Church lives on. The Empire began in pride and splendor, the Church in humility and insignificance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They do not live in the world, Are not in time and space.... From birth to death hurled No word do they have, not one To plant a foot upon, Were never in any place.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Pregnancy demonstrates the deterministic character of woman's sexuality. Every pregnant woman has body and self taken over by a ch...thonian force beyond her control. In the welcome pregnancy, this is a happy sacrifice. But in the unwanted one, initated by rape or misadventure, it is a horror. Such unfortunate women look directly into nature's heart of darkness. For a fetus is a benign tumor, a vampire who steals in order to live. The so-called miracle of birth is nature getting her own way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All mothers need instruction, nurturing, and an understanding mentor after the birth of a baby, but in this age of fast foods, fas...t tracks, and fast lanes, it doesn't always happen. While we live in a society that provides recognition for just about every life event--from baptisms to bar mitzvahs, from wedding vows to funeral rites--the entry into parenting seems to be a solo flight, with nothing and no one to mark formally the new mom's entry into motherhood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
See the kind seed-receiving earth To every grain affords a birth:... On her no showers unwelcome fall, Her willing womb retains 'em all, And shall my Caelia be confined? No, live up to thy mighty mind, And be the mistress of Mankind!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »